I think the major difference is that (while absurdly suspicious-looking at the time), the NSA’s meddling in DES turned out to be a warning about an attack on the standard nobody else knew about yet. It looked super sketchy; but apparently the NSA itself was on the side of a better DES standard at the time.
Now we know that the NSA is as opaque and high handed in their involvement as ever (and, unfortunately, still a pretty sharp bunch, so getting their good advice would be valuable); but definitely is not in favor of actually-good encryption standards anymore. This makes their continued involvement deeply problematic.
